Aidnography

Hello all, A packed weekly review with a special 'Development +' section that focuses on tech & digital issues...but let's start with a great photo essay on Western people doing mundane things followed by a new study on how Africa tweets, Nepal's slow and difficult transformation to improve women's lives, a great essay on labour-centred development as empowerment, new research that revisits large dams, a new book that challenges 'Protest Inc'; tech talent in Kenya, big data & resilience, new tools vs. old mindsets and essays on 'mindful' consumerism and 'digital Turks' round off the Development part. Two posts on 'digital pedagogy' in the Academia section and your bookmarks for weekend reading is complete! Enjoy! Development Unprecedented images of Western people looking just like you and me We have all wondered how Western people look like in everyday situations, behind the veil of exoticism that surrounds their myster

Hello all, Finally a weekly link review that's pretty much on time ;)! New research on peacebuilding rituals, old insights into Nepal development politics and how the ADB is only 'open' when it suits. There's more on the relationship between NGOs and journalists, a PhD thesis on OLPC, the limits of collaborative technology and 'hacking' as a life motto. In Academia , we look at whether African PhD education will be repeating OECD mistakes, mental well-being and innovations in collaborative learning! Enjoy! New on aidnography Performing Peace-building: Conferences, Rituals and the Role of Ethnographic Research The basic idea is to apply classic anthropological concepts such as 'ritual' and 'performance' to the expanding spaces where peacebuilding is non-happening, i.e. indoor events, workshops and conferences. As the excerpt from the conclusion indicates, the emerging 'ritual economy' of organizations and experts has become an important

Hi all, It is always great to see a final product after a long and winding publication process! As part of a special double issue of the IDS Bulletin entitled ' New Perspectives from PhD Field Research' , my latest article 'Performing Peace-building - Conferences, Rituals and the Role of Ethnographic Research' is finally available! As always, an un-gated pre-print version of the paper is available from Academia.edu as well. My article is based on my PhD research and the advantage of revising, shortening and rethinking some of the theoretical and empirical issues behind it is that the outcome should be a reasonably readable article-in line with the mission of the IDS Bulletin to publish scholarship in an accessible way. Abstract This article explores performance and ritual theory in the context of anthropological research on peace-building institutions and knowledge discourses, as well as the process of writing up an ethnographic PhD thesis. Based on fieldw

Dear all, This slightly more comprehensive link review makes for excellent end-of-beginning-of week reading! And best of all, it is a Ukraine-free round-up ;)! After a few announcements on crowd-sourced development knowledge, there is Bosnia and the failures of liberal peacebuilding, Haiti and the shortcoming of child sponsorship and India and the failures of tax governance; Burning questions like 'why avoid hip gadgets for development?' or 'what do White House policy-makers really read?' and career-related issues on MPH and the crushing power of aid bureaucracies round off the development section. Anthropology is all about writing more truthfully, more beautifully and more books! In Academia we look at fake conferences and their fake papers, a conference on the many faces of 'publish or perish' and an obituary of Stuart Hall from a Communication for Development perspective! Enjoy! New on aidnography ICT4D after Snowden From the Snowden leaks to the ‘deep sta

From the Snowden leaks to the ‘ deep state ’ -why the surveillance state is an issue for development. Edward Snowden (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Edward_Snowden-2.jpg) Maybe the Snowden-NSA-surveillance debate does not have a direct and obvious link to ICT4D or development debates. In fact, I do not recall reading many comments in the development blogosphere that explicitly link these two issues. The absence of a broader debate may have partly to do with the overall fatigue and fatalism that Snowden’s leaks and the subsequent reporting seem to incur, but partly also with the depoliticized nature of large parts of the ICT4D and development community. I believe that our believe in open data, ICT 4 Good , the positive power of the Internet and mobile technology should be shaken by the transatlantic discoveries, rights violations and revelations that once seemed to be confined to conspiracy websites. Nothing suggests that other states, institutions or companies would not foll